I remember Sultan Pasha eight years ago handing me a package at Esxence. It contained a jumble of tiny 1 ml bottles with dipper caps, half full of dark sticky things so viscous and concentrated that you would have had to dilute them tenfold before assessing them. Of which there seemed little point, because each was something like the last dollop of that particular thing on the face of the earth.
These were attars, an alcohol-free form of perfumery1 largely dictated by the prohibition of ethanol in Muslim countries. In classical attars, the “solvent” was sandalwood oil. These days, it is more likely to be another raw material or isopropyl myristate, the latter almost odorless and reasonably volatile. Attars are very powerful, often made up of a few top-notch materials, and best worn on fabric, because you may not want to put neat fragrance oils on skin.
However great, artisanal attars generally offend my sense of perfume as an industrial product, made from materials that will not disappear by morning, sold at a concentration that you can actually use, and composed by someone who wants to give the thing a name and sell as many as possible. Extreme versions of the attar obsession verge on the ridiculous, as in “last batch of 200-year old oud, hand distilled at altitude and blessed by Master Boutros in a Nestorian monastery in Sikkim.” Give me Brut any time.
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